Thursday, February 4, 2016

The Time that Hackers Made Me Arabic

If you take a look at me, there's pretty much a zero percent chance that you'd mistake me for someone of Arabic or Middle Eastern descent. But about 2 days ago, if you were to take a look at my instagram, you might get a different idea.

I'll start at the beginning.

On Tuesday night, I got several follow requests from people I didn't know. I didn't think much of it, I accepted their requests and moved on with my life. Wednesday morning, I noticed that 2 different individuals with the name of "Ahmed" had requested to follow me. I thought it was a really funny coincidence, so I took a screenshot.

But then I started thinking a little bit more about it. Why was I getting follow requests at all? I have a public profile. Anyone can follow me without my permission. Then I looked closer at some of the people that had requested to follow me. They weren't just following me. They were following me back. I was already following them.

What? I never followed these people. What is going on?

Then I looked closer at my profile. My profile picture hadn't changed. I was still as white as they come. But my name had changed. It was something in Arabic. I also looked at who I was following. I was following all the people I used to follow, as well as a little over 100 other individuals, most of them Arabic. (I clicked on profiles and their pictures had captions written in Arabic.)

The obvious conclusion was that I had been hacked.

I can only think of two possible theories for why this hacking occurred.

One of my friends thinks that Arabic culture would really suit me, so they thought I might enjoy seeing pictures of that culture. (If this is true and it was you, the better strategy is to make me some Arabic food. I'm just sayin')

Someone in an Arabic country has one of those things where people pay for followers. They used my account as a follower and wanted it to seem like a legit Arab account.

Somebody just thought it would be really funny. (I probably would agree with them.)

Maybe there is some other reason. I'm not sure.

I think the strangest part of all of it was that they set my account to private. I think it would have taken me much longer to realize it if they hadn't done that. The follow back requests were what set me off.

The important thing is that I changed my password and unfollowed all of my new Arabic friends. (Although, I think some of the follow backs still follow me.) I also set my profile to public again, so all of you are free to follow me without asking my permission.